External Hard Drive Not Working

Anyone have a suggestion as to where to go when an external hard drive dies. Tried Staples without any luck. I really don’t want to lose all those images! But, I don’t want to pay hundreds trying to retrieve them either.

Help!

I had a client with a Western Digital hard drive that failed. Sent it to Western Digital data recovery and recovered most, but it won’t be cheap. Tell me you have at least 1 backup…

Same experience here. They recovered most of our data. Wasn’t cheap, but a comparatively small cost weighed against complete loss of the work.

Patricia
Sorry to hear you are having this issue! Just wanted to chime in that your images are worth a few hundred to save!!!

Now , reading this has reminded me I am way overdue on backups!

I hope you solve this
Kathy

As encouragement for more backups, we recently paid around $125/each for several WD 5-terabyte portables at Costco. My wife and I both are pretty manic about duplicate backups after our long-ago drive failure. An extra $125 for 5 terabytes of duplicate backups is chump change compared what we paid for storage 10 years ago. Frankly didn’t even know what a terabyte was in those days, and I can recall buying 300mb WD drives for about that price.

BTW- Duplicate backups are further insurance against theft or loss. We each carry two of the 5TB drives on trips, and before traveling home Fedex one apiece home.

@Patricia_Brundage You might want to take a look at data recovery apps. This would be much less expensive than sending to WD.

Take a look at Recuva Pro from Piriform, or, you can search for such an app–there are several out there.
-p

Speaking of Costco, many of the drives they are now selling come with two years of data recovery insurance. That makes the cost of a large storage drive even more valuable. Most drives sold at Costco come with a two-year warranty on the drive itself. Costco usually doubles the warranty time limit on many of its products.

Thanks for all your suggestions. I will check out data recovery and Costco options.

Good suggestions already; I’ll just add that there are a lot of free-trial data recovery programs to try. I’d save sending it off to a formal data-recovery place as the last choice.
Also, another thought - there are FRY’S electronic places all over, and they do data recovery in-house, the last I knew.
I agree with kathy that ANY of your lost images are well worth paying to recover.
Good luck -
Sandy

It’s quite possible that the hard drive itself is fine and the only thing not working is the external usb interface. It might be worth a try taking the drive out of the enclosure and connecting it to a computer internally.

Patricia, good luck with your data recovery. You have good suggestions above.

I just want to chime in about the importance of having a cloud backup as insurance when all else fails.